The chart is only as good as the photo.

1. Light it evenly

Soft, even light — an overcast day, an open window, a shaded spot — keeps skin and fur as one colour family instead of splitting them into highlight, midtone and shadow palettes. Avoid on-camera flash and hard midday sun.

2. One subject, filling the frame

Crop tight. At 100 stitches wide a face gets roughly 40 stitches, which is enough to be recognisable; a full-body shot in a room gives the face 8 stitches and the sofa 60.

3. Keep the background quiet

Plain walls, sky, grass and blurred backdrops convert cleanly. Bookshelves, patterned fabric and foliage turn into confetti. If the background is busy and you can't reshoot, use AI redraw to flatten it.

4. Contrast between subject and setting

A black cat on a dark sofa will merge. A black cat on a cream blanket won't. Contrast is what lets the chart keep its edges after quantising.

5. Resolution doesn't matter much

The chart is downsampled to your stitch width anyway. A sharp 800-pixel photo beats a blurry 4,000-pixel one every time.

When to use AI redraw

• Sunsets, skies and any soft gradient
• Fine texture: fur, hair, foliage, fabric weave
• Cluttered rooms or crowds
• Low-light photos with heavy noise

AI redraw flattens the image into clean colour regions while keeping the subject recognisable, and then the direct converter takes over as usual.